Touched on this once before, no?
Paid my daily visit to One and Four just a bit ago. Saw there the same thing I saw a few minutes earlier in my e-mail. This. MySpace, the stupid yet innocent megasite for people to meet and interact with other people (as much as you really can via the written word on a screen anyway), is considered such a danger to youth by almost exclusively folks who never use the Internet let alone that website that politicians are planning on making a federal law that schools and libraries prohibit anyone under 18 from accessing the site on their computers.
Are they out of their fucking minds? Wait. Of course they are. They’re trying to get votes from worried irrational parents by screwing over folks too young to vote so they lose little to no support in doing this!
But let me get this straight. Of 70 million some MySpace users, only a small handful have gotten themselves harmed by being stupid enough to give out their personal info to an untrustworthy person via the site. So, in other words, if a 16-year-old had instead called this person on the phone, would the phone company be at fault? Why are the innocent conduits being blamed for a danger the victim sought out his or her own self?
And I’ve been saying this for years. How is an online friend any different from a penpal? Hell, at least this way, no dealing with the post office or buying stamps. In fact, it’s even more safe. A penpal has your home address and real name. An Internet friend does not unless you explicitly provide them.
Looking at the news stories about MySpace, of which I think every major media outlet is required to have at least eight per week, most of the stories are not anything really negative. Sometimes it’s just a rumor about a bomb scare that circulated on MySpace. Let me ask you something. If there were a fucking bomb scare at your school, wouldn’t you want to fucking know about it? Instead, they even spin something like this, with high school students actually warning each other about possible imminent danger, to be a sign that MySpace is bad for kids. That kind of sheer stupidity surprises even me!
And while we’re protecting kids from dangers, why aren’t we going after more common ones? Who’s protecting the five-year-old who gets molested every night by both parents? Who’s protecting the girl who would be severely beaten if she expresses a political view even slightly against what her father believes? Who’s rescuing the 13-year-old boy who came out of the closet only to have his fundamentalist parents ship him off to an abusive camp over it? Who’s saving the girl who’s mother continually injures her because she craves the sympathy she gets from people when her daughter needs medical attention? The list goes on. The world for youth is shit. And all these attempts to protect youth from shit instead puts them in deeper shit and doesn’t do anything about the shit they were really in in the first place.
This has me so fucking pissed I can’t see straight. Know better, folks! Don’t let this happen. Morons.
For that matter, who’s protecting the kids who go to the school where the bomb scares are?
I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again, schools are dangerous places! Almost as dangerous as home or church, but not quite.
I’m going to become a journalist and run exposes on the dangers kids are encountering via pen pal programs. Scary stuff, I tell you.
I AGREE !! WICHU MYSPACE IS BEING RETARTED SUMTIMES IT GETS ANNOYING
Yes. We rock. You do too, even though your 22, but you’re standing up for us. People listen to you, and you’re expressing our views. GO KATRINA!